Review - Fingernails
Directed by: Christos Nikou
Written by: Christos Nikou
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White
Running Time: 113 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Do you think they’re alone together?
Earlier this year, Celine Song’s Past Lives opens with her main protagonists chatting in the middle of a New York bar, someone off screen narrating the characters interacting, deciphering the relationships, who’s on the outs and where the attention and love really is. Christos Nikou’s Fingernails similarly examines this - but this time, with his protagonist, Jessie Buckley’s Anna watching another couple from afar as they have dinner together at the same restaurant.
Song invites us to make assumptions of her main protagonists without any character context or emotional weight. In Fingernails, there is a eerie dread of discomfort, the communal recognition of aimless human relationships that feel stagnant or one-sided. Enter a world where the love and compatibility between two people can be defined, destroyed and lifetimes erased with a simple test. Like our own bodies, Nikou accentuates how love and relationships are essential to be nurtured and cared for, without it, we forget why we fell in love in the first place. Just like our fingernails, left unkept, we cut deep and feel unclean.
Anna (Jessie Buckley) and Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) have been together for a number of years; they’re happily in love and perfectly complimentary of each other. They’ve already secured their guarantee that they are made for one another by taking the test - an extraction of one’s fingernails (one respectively for each of the couple) and then determining if their body, mind and soul are perfectly in alignment - they’re in love with one another - tearing away any notion of doubt and insecurity. Your fingers, wrapped in a bandage; it becomes a badge of honor - a monument of self-preservation, yearning and even and emotional and social wound. You’ve taken the test - you’ve sacrificed a piece of yourself to clear any sense of insecurity you may have…or yet, it may lead you to an even more painful or uncomfortable place. You may find that both you and you partner are wholly in love - or one of you are in love - or neither of you are meant for each other. It is both a testament of truth, perseverance and selflessness to pluck the petal from the flowers. They love me, they love me not, they love me, they love me not…
When Anna crosses paths with Amir (Riz Ahmed); she begins to wonder if her perfectly sound relationship with Ryan is everything that she had hoped for. It is clear that Anna cares deeply for Ryan and their longstanding relationship a key factor in such comfort, love and safety - but the relationship seems to be stuck at a red light. It feels too comfortable, too safe, too normal for Anna to wholly feel engaged in her life - but when her work relationship with Amir pulls them closer and closer, Anna finds herself reevaluating her life and her loves.
Nikou’s parable feels like an exploration of love in modernity; the security, the safety and the knowingness of familiarity. Fingernails elevates its thematic heartbeat with a drawling sprawl; it moves at a glacial pace, channeling the banality of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, characters speak and move at a tied emotional wavelength; its climaxes aren’t earthshattering or seat-shaking - its strength is in its quiet reflection - the implication of Anna’s decisions are contemplative mirrors of a sheltered innocence, a quiet yearning and even a cry for help. A relationship is always a heartbeat entangled by two souls, wrapped in passion and a communal desire for intimacy and love. Nikou seeks to unravel the challenges of such emotional weight but it feels as if the film is just coasting across the surface of something inherently powerful and divine. Buckley and Ahmed’s chemistry is captivating and heartfelt - but even when the stakes are raised against her relationship with Ryan; Fingernails doesn’t seem to push its conflicts past the confines of its genre, it cuts you with precision - but not deep enough to leave a scar.
What almost feels like an experiment that marries Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi ideals from Black Mirror and Yorgos Lanthimos’ eccentricity and monotony - Christos Nikou’s Fingernails feels like its just scratching the surface of something provocative and emotionally impactful. From its strange but yet endearing premise - guided by wonderous performances of its key cast (Buckley - especially) Nikou’s film stretches itself just far enough to earn a stirring and compelling watch, though, just short of something special. A surreal dreamscape of a future not so far away, Nikou’s challenges us with the notion of authenticity, purpose and the yearning of truth and indescribable love. Fingernails is both sharp and bothersome, but cuts deep in its message of loneliness, love and acceptance.
